


The Exodus is Here

by meeks00



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-26
Updated: 2009-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:39:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meeks00/pseuds/meeks00
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Nate gets in an accident, his men come to visit him. One of them stays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Exodus is Here

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The Who’s "Baba O’Riley."

They don’t talk much.

Brad stands barefoot and in sweatpants in the middle of the living room of Nate’s apartment, flipping channels in front of the TV. He seems to fill space more than just take it up, and Nate stands in the doorway of the kitchen with all of his weight on his right leg, trying to remember if he ever felt that his apartment was empty before Brad came along. He can’t remember what it was like.

He holds two cups of hot chocolate as requested, and he wishes he had some marshmallows.

When Brad glances at him from over one shoulder, there is that familiar half smile that unfreezes Nate’s socked feet so that he moves forward.

“If I put on _American Chopper_ , are you going to fall asleep on me?” Brad asks, walking over to take the cups.

Nate shakes his head and follows him into the living room, moving slowly so as to not put pressure on his left hip, and he finally settles with a relieved sigh on his side of the couch. With a couple of small sips of hot cocoa, he downs two white pills and then the oblong orange one that Brad holds out for him, and then he angles his leg so that it’s not in a position where it’ll get stiff.

When he’s settled, he watches Brad stretch out next to him. Brad goes through the now-familiar routine of placing his elbow on the couch’s armrest so his mug is steady, crosses his legs at the ankle on the glass of the coffee table, and spreads his other arm over the backboard of the couch behind them. Nate wonders at how his mind has already reassessed the situation and figured Brad into the equation.

His side. Plus Brad’s side. Equals “them.”

He can feel the heat from a hand before the warmth of Brad’s palm settles behind his neck. He self-consciously dips his head down for a sip of his drink, and for some reason he’s comforted when the hand follows and squeezes just a bit — like a reminder, or a persistent touch, a statement of _being there_. When he glances over, Brad’s lips are quirked up just a bit.

Nate leans back again, this time crossing over the divide between their sides to settle against a shoulder in the crook of an open arm.

“All we need now are some marshmallows,” Nate thinks he hears Brad mutter, but when Nate turns to look at him, Brad is taking a sip of his cocoa, and his expression is blank as if he never said a word.

*****

When Nate got in the accident, he figured that it was probably karma for all the things he’d done wrong in his life. He remembers the sound of tires on wet pavement, then the sharp sound of a blaring horn, and then he was T-boned on his side of the car. All he remembers about that is the flash of the headlights through a cracking windshield, a sharp pain in his left side, and then an utter, terrifying pitch black. It figured that he would be taken out by a speeding truck in the rain than from fucking bullets or RPGs in Iraq.

His parents stayed with him at the hospital, transported him back to his apartment because he was adamant about taking care of himself. When they left, he assumed it wasn’t the end, but he was surprised that they let him off so easily.

Then Ray came to visit — “You need a nursemaid, LT, but no worries, I won’t be a naughty one” — and Nate decided that it truly was karma.

He had first been used to the idea that he was well and truly fucked—physically from his mangled left hip, but also mentally from Ray’s sheer force of personality. But then he started getting used to the constant rattle pouring out of Ray’s mouth that it was like he was back in Iraq, listening to his men over the comms. He found it oddly comforting.

“How did you find out that this happened, Ray?” Nate asked one day. He was lying prone on the sofa in front of the TV on mute — any extra background noise plus Ray Person just equated to something disastrous, like a vocal fight for the highest volume possible — as Ray cooked up some pasta in the kitchen. Ray had a thing for rotini noodles, and Nate honestly couldn’t say he was that surprised.

When Ray poked his head out of the doorway of the kitchen, his smile was a muted version of his usual shit-eating grin. “Heard it through our dear USMC grapevine — like a fuckin’ family phone tree. Gunny heard it from your parents; Poke heard it from Gunny; Brad heard it from Poke; and I heard about it from Brad. Hence my fabulous presence.” He ducked back into the kitchen.

“Brad’s still with the Royal Marines.”

Nate could hear Ray’s laugh from the kitchen. “There’s no fooling you.” After a pause, Ray went on, “There is such a thing as international phone service, you know. Like with phone cards. Or Skype. Brad and I are digitally kinky with that shit, in addition to being technological geniuses. Or is it genii? Like octopus and octopi? Did they teach you anything about that in your preppy, pansy-assed Ivy League curriculum, sir?”

“I stopped listening to you, Ray, sorry,” Nate called back. He heard laughter again and couldn’t help but grin. “So, how does you hearing it from Brad lead to you coming here? Boston isn’t really in the vicinity of Nevada, Missouri, as far as I know.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Nate heard the clanging of pots and pans, as if Ray was now just making noise for the hell of it. “I can’t hear you, LT. You’re going to have to talk a little bit louder than that!” Ray called back. And then he started singing.

A moment later the doorbell rang, and when Nate pushed up on his elbows, a shot of pain streaked from his hip to his toes, and he let out a strangled gasp as he collapsed back down on the pillows. Ray ran out of the kitchen with a steaming pot still half-filled with noodles in one hand and a draining ladle in the other. He was wearing an apron, the kind that said ‘Kiss the cook,’ which Nate assumed he’d brought with him since Nate didn’t have one around the apartment.

“Shit. Dinner’s not done yet,” he muttered, bopping Nate on the head with the ladle as he went for the door. “And you lie back down. What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

The doorbell rang again, and Ray made a frustrated sound as he put the ladle in the pot, but then he was grinning as he opened the door. Nate tried to see past the slighter man’s body from the couch, but moving just sent another spike of pain down his left side. “ _Fuck_ ,” he muttered.

“Wasn’t the whole point of us coming here to take care of him? He sounds like he’s in pain.”

Nate glanced around again and saw Walt pushing past Ray. “Walt?”

“Hey, sir,” Walt said with a sideways smile. “Sorry I couldn’t come earlier. I wanted to catch a flight here right when the Iceman called too, but exams and everything, you know, so I sent Ray ahead.”

“Brad called you?” Nate asked.

Walt turned to shoot a look at Ray, who shrugged. “Must finish dinner,” Ray said, walking briskly to the kitchen.

“Ray — ”

“Walt.”

Walt sighed and dropped his bag by the coffee table. “How’re you feeling?” he asked, coming over to sit on the adjacent couch. He picked up the various pill bottles. “Have you been taking these on schedule?”

Nate looked first at him, and then toward the kitchen. “Honestly, I can take care of myself. Pills. Water. Not that hard, guys,” he replied. “Now what’s this about Brad?”

“Well, somebody was supposed to explain,” Walt began, but then Ray ran back out, still holding the ladle in one hand.

“No. Nobody was supposed to explain,” he said, stabbing the ladle in Walt’s direction. “We have _orders_ to follow, Walter.”

“Raymond — ”

“That isn’t actually my full name,” Ray said with a smirk.

“Josh Ray.”

“OK, that’s better. But still. _Orders_.” He pointed the ladle with a stern expression at Walt.

“Are either of you going to explain what the fuck is going on?” Nate finally burst out, getting a sense of vertigo washing over him from their back and forth repartee. “What am I missing?”

“We talked about this. We decided we’d explain because this stupid little dance of theirs is fucking ridiculous!” Walt exclaimed.

Ray lowered the ladle. “He’s so fucked up on painkillers that it’ll probably just blow his mind. Look at him, for chrissakes!”

Nate felt both of their eyes on him and tried to stare back as if the world wasn’t spinning, but when Walt sighed, he thought maybe that didn’t work out too well.

Walt frowned at Ray, and Ray pursed his lips and widened his eyes, as if showing that holding in whatever information he was keeping was going to make him explode too. “This is stupid,” was all Walt said.

Ray expelled his breath and grinned, and Nate really wished he wasn’t so woozy from the drugs because he knew he’d be able to figure it all out if not for the fact that he was under a cocktail of pills.

“It’s full-on, ass-backwards _retarded_ , is what it is,” Ray said. “Now be happy. I’m making your favorite.”

“Pot roast?” Walt asked, expression lightening.

Ray looked like he was holding back a smirk. “Rotinis with chicken-broccoli alfredo sauce.”

“Ray, that’s _your_ favorite. And you don’t pluralize ‘rotini’—we’ve been over this.”

“You love _everything_ I cook, you backwoods hillbilly,” Ray replied, turning to head back into the kitchen with a big grin. “And I’ll pluralize you.”

Walt turned to Nate then, finally, and rolled his eyes. “I do. He’s a pretty good cook. But don’t tell him I said that or his head’ll just get bigger than it already is,” he said in a lowered voice.

Nate was scowling at him, because he still couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was going on. “What the fuck?” he asked.

“Ignore him. I hope you have been. It’s the only way to survive while in his presence.” Walt rattled the pills in Nate’s face. “Have you taken these?” He lifted his head and called to the kitchen, “Ray, is he due for more pills? He looks like he’s about to puke.”

“Give him a hydrocodone!”

“Vicodin? I don’t know if more euphoric meds are going to help him any.”

“He’s fuckin’ hilarious when he’s high on those. And his hip is killing him more than he lets on. You know how he is. Just give him one!”

Nate just sighed as Walt looked him over, but then Walt handed him a pill. Nate downed it dry. “There we go,” Walt said, patting his good knee.

Nate fell asleep before dinner was ready, but he woke up a few times to see Walt and Ray sitting on the other couch, eating and watching some cartoon, bickering to fill the silence of the muted TV, and he found it oddly comforting.

Later, after the sun’s light was no longer seeping through the crack in the curtains, Ray shook him awake to take more pills, and then he was fast asleep again.

That night, in the haze of what he assumed was still that euphoric side effect of the drugs, Nate heard muffled voices down the hall. He was still on the couch, but he was too comfortable or too drugged up to feel anything at all, so he didn’t mind. The voices got quieter, and then he heard the click of a door.

Singular.

He decided, right before falling asleep, that he just wasn’t going to ask and leave it at that.

*****

He was all but healed when Ray and Walt picked up and left. He wouldn't admit to it later, but he remembers feeling a bit bereft without the constant white noise of their bickering. His hip still looked like unprocessed meat sewn together by a middle school home ec student, and he was still downing a cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics from the array of bottles next to him on the coffee table.

So when Brad showed up the evening after they left, Nate was kind of fucked sideways and backwards, so much so that he just said “Good morning” at eleven at night when Brad walked in after picking the lock to his apartment.

Brad was pale, as if they didn't give him enough sun in England, and Nate kind of thought it was a shame. He thought of freckles and strong shoulders under the sun. He thought of MOPP suit suspenders hanging by sharp hipbones at the waist and airplane sounds that made him feel light and just as free as the bird Brad had imitated back in that desert land.

“Free as a bird, sir?” Brad asked, setting his military-issue duffel by the door. He was still dressed in uniform, starched and pressed dark blue and so formal.

Nate remembers that he could barely recognize him.

“Trust me, LT, I’m still that same sergeant under your command,” Brad said.

“Are you reading my mind?” Nate asked blearily, running his hands over his face.

Brad’s lips quirked up in a half smile, and Nate saw the Brad Colbert he knew peek through this polished soldier. “Maybe,” Brad replied.

“Hm…I think I’m pretty fucked up, Brad,” Nate said, and he accidentally bit down on his tongue when he said it. He thought there might have been some pain there, but he couldn’t feel it because there were enough drugs in his system to wash away the ache in his hip that it made him pretty much lose feeling everywhere else too.

When he put a finger in his mouth and pulled it away colored pink with spit and blood, Brad’s face tightened almost imperceptibly, but Nate saw it because he’d always been very finely attuned to Two-One’s TL.

Brad left the room at a brisk walk that Nate remembered as signifying something like repressed anger, because Brad never allowed himself to speak out of turn. Nate swallowed blood, and he was wondering at the metallic taste without the pain when Brad came back out with one of Nate’s kitchen towels, which was a little darker from being wet.

“You’re angry,” Nate said.

Brad knelt down on the floor beside the couch and pushed the towel into Nate’s face, and Nate looked at the tight lines around the man’s jaw, the lips pressed together in a thin line.

But at his words, Brad’s eyebrows went up as if in surprise. “Pardon?”

“You look angry, anyway,” Nate said, pulling the towel away from the other man.

“I’m not angry,” Brad replied, slowly pulling his hand away. “You’re just pretty fucked up, sir.”

Nate shrugged and stuck his tongue out, pressing it into the cloth, and he almost swore Brad was trying not to laugh. Whoever said Brad Colbert was the Iceman for his lack of emotional responses, they clearly hadn’t seen him this up close.

When Brad’s face went blank, Nate wondered again if he might have said that out loud.

“You may have,” Brad replied. “Try to stop thinking for a while, why don’t you?”

Nate considered that while he rubbed the towel over his tongue. He noticed with an odd sense of detachment that Brad carefully tracked the movement with his eyes. “I think that may be the weirdest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Nate told him.

It was quiet then, and Brad went to sit at the foot of the couch, lifting Nate’s feet up and settling them over his thighs. Brad turned on the TV, pulled up the listing guide, and Nate thought about how his feet felt really warm then.

When Brad glanced at him with a raised brow, Nate said, “Maybe I _should_ stop thinking for a while.”

Later that night, Brad said suddenly, “My ex used to say I was very unemotional.” His eyes were fixed directly at the screen. “Seemed like that carried over to how I get in combat, so I guess the men gave me that nickname—the Iceman. So many people say it, means it’s probably true, right?”

Nate watched the profile of his face—the pale eyelashes almost invisible in the dim light of the living room at night, the splotch of brilliant blue of one eye, the curve of a strong nose.

Brad looked at him then, the corner of his lip lifting in a grin. “I’m only telling you this because you probably won’t remember it tomorrow,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.

“I’m thinking…that’s not something I’ll forget, Brad,” Nate replied, and he watched Brad watching him. “And…I’m thinking that might be the first time you’ve told me something that isn’t true.”

Brad looked him over carefully for a while, and Nate remembers even now how—despite the fact that at the time he was pumped full of drugs and felt exhausted and was utterly confused as to what Brad was doing there—he remembers how that stare never made him feel uncomfortable.

*****

Nate isn’t sure when his place became ‘home,’ or when his apartment for one became ‘theirs.’ He doesn’t remember when they decided Brad was going to stay, when he realized that Ray and Walt were placeholders for the big attraction that had to wait for leave eligibility from the Royal Marines.

What he does remember is the quiet that settled over his home when Ray and Walt left. But in the place of all that noise was a steady, solid presence that he could always find nearby when he woke up from a drug-induced sleep or when he was confused about where he was.

What he does remember is when he realized Brad was terrible in the kitchen, but so finely attuned to how Nate was feeling. When he started weaning himself off of the drugs, Brad was there with a glass of wine and a great pick from Nate’s collection of CDs by the surround sound system. Then Nate would make dinner and they’d eat by the TV because, if anything, all they’d ever been was formal with each other, and that time had long since passed.

He remembers when he realized Brad was a stickler for having everything in its place, and when he realized that he felt like his entire life was being put in order. His CDs were alphabetized, his dishes all in their proper places, his clothes all folded and put away—their workouts matched and meal times in sync and shows all compromised each night. They had their own sides of the couch, of the bureau, of the bed.

He doesn’t remember when all the pieces in his life fell into place, into a ‘whole’ rather than parts he needed to pull together.

What he does remember, though, is what he felt. What he feels.

 _Mine. His. Ours._

*****

When they fuck, Brad is eerily quiet. He’ll whisper a sharp curse, cut off a moan, and Nate wonders if it’s a leftover reaction, a residual way of responding from living the majority of his adult life in a war zone under the threat of fire. But for all his silence, he seems to do everything in his power to make Nate cry out.

His hands ghost over Nate’s body, barely touching, but Nate can feel each one of those touches with pangs of electric fire so sharp that what he feels is almost like pain. When Nate arches up into the curve of Brad’s body over his, he can feel Brad’s smile against the skin of his neck, a louder gesture than any words the man might have said.

Brad is not necessarily careful so much as _calculating_ in every tantalizing move he makes: lips there, tongue here, fingers _in there_. It’s as if every single touch, new position, and hot breath on skin, is premeditated, carefully considered to get the biggest reaction, and Nate never seems to disappoint.

He’ll moan, cry out, beg even, and he loves the subsequent feeling of lips and teeth on his skin in that moment when he thinks he’s going to break in two from sheer pleasure, when he recognizes the physical feeling of one of Brad’s silent grins on his sweaty skin.

Afterward, spent, they both settle against one another for sleep. Brad pulls Nate’s left leg gently over his body, hand resting on the rough, scarred skin on his hip. Half lifted and resting at an angle like that means it won’t be stiff in the morning, and Nate rests his head on a shoulder and throws his arm over the man’s torso, just for the symmetry of it.

They are sweaty and sticky and tangled in the sheets, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but their bodies mold together in a way that always makes it work. They fall asleep, breaths and heartbeats evening out into something rhythmic and in sync, and in that moment when he’s in that state on the cusp of sleep and consciousness, Nate can’t ever remember the silence of falling asleep alone.

They don’t talk much, Nate thinks as he watches Brad’s pale eyelashes flutter to a close, but they don’t need to.

 _fin_   



End file.
